The following is from BOE member Bill Leonard. So don’t look for many answers from the CRP honchos.
***Did CRP Pay “Volunteers” $120 Per Hour?***
In recent issues I have discussed the need for a detailed audit of the California Republican Party’s spending for the November election. There remain far more questions than answers, despite numerous calls for a full accounting. The party’s efforts to register new voters may provide the best example. For decades, the CRP paid Republican volunteer organizations a bounty of up to $3 for each newly registered Republicans voter. Despite problems here and there, this was very effective– both in numbers of voters registered and as a means of funding local Republican organizations. In accordance with state law, Republican volunteers also registered voters from other parties. Last fall, though, the CRP abandoned this successful volunteer-based program in favor of hiring vendors directly.
These paid vendors allegedly focused on registering voters in just 13 of California’s 58 counties. They were paid on an hourly basis, rather than on the verified number of voters registered. The results are in dispute, but it appears that the CRP paid the vendors about $17 per registered Republican. (At that price, many traditional volunteers would have quit their day jobs to register voters on a full time basis.) I am told that level of compensation amounts to around $68 per hour, for many locations. To make matters worse, sources report that only around half the alleged registrations are verifiable because the vendors have not yet submitted proof for the other half, pending resolution of a contract dispute. We are apparently supposed to take the word of the paid vendors that they registered as many people as they claim without proof of any kind. I am too familiar with this type of program to take their word for it. Thus, if the vendors only registered as many voters!
as we can currently verify, we may have been paying the equivalent of $120 per hour. How many great volunteers would have applied for those jobs?
Clearly, I do not have all the facts, but that is precisely the point. Republican donors, volunteers, vendors and nominees all need to know how the money was spent so that we can avoid committing the same mistakes next time.